Attention All Passengers (30 page)

Brett Snyder—better known as the Cranky Flier of CrankyFlier.com—illustrates the challenge that is presented to editors, producers, and bloggers every day: some airlines are more than happy to provide ready-made editorial content. He explains: “There's no question a good public relations or marketing firm will not pay for coverage. But there are bad PR and marketing firms that will. I'm approached all the time. They want you to pimp your product.”

And sometimes press releases are just wrong. In May 2011, Cheapflights.com issued a release titled “How to Save on Hidden Travel Fees,” which included the following: “If you're traveling with family, evaluate if you want to buy a seat for a child. Most airlines don't charge for children under the age of two to fly, so weigh if you want to hold your child or use an arguably safer car seat on the flight.” Arguably? There is no argument—none whatsoever—among aviation safety experts about whether a child in a restraint system is safer than a lap child. Unfortunately, too many news organizations reprint such releases without any form of fact-checking.

And even the best reporters can be duped by industry spinmeisters. Consider the
CBS Evening News with Katie Couric
, which in 2010 reported on the DOT's new stranded-passenger policy, but either intentionally or unintentionally spun it in favor of the airlines: “New Tarmac Delay Rules Could Up Cancellations.” This piece reflected the airlines' unfounded and ultimately untrue claim that the new policy, which requires that passengers trapped on the tarmac be freed from taxiing aircraft after three hours, would lead to more flight delays. Strangely, the segment included a quote from the CEO of Hong Kong–based Cathay Pacific Airways, a very odd source for a story detailing what was at the time a domestic policy. And it also included an unattributed omniscient statement: “Now the airlines say instead of delaying flights, they may just cancel them outright.”

Yet this entire issue amounted to airline industry blustering and bullying. The proof came by October—just six months later—when DOT monthly statistics confirmed that
no
domestic flights were delayed for three hours or more, and flight cancellations
fell
. The DOT was proven right, while the airlines and their water carriers were proven to be needlessly crying wolf, but this clearly demonstrated how the powerful airline lobby can steer a public debate.

There's yet another form of media bias that permeates aviation coverage in the United States (and around the world). Companies and events with high profiles in media capitals receive a disproportionate amount of coverage, and the inverse is true as well. A few years ago a producer for one of the major morning talk shows was briefing me in the greenroom about my segment on airline baggage fees. While discussing which airlines charged the most, I pointed out that in fairness we should mention the two domestic carriers that didn't charge at all for first checked bags, Southwest and JetBlue. His nose crinkled and he said, “You can mention JetBlue, but not too many people have ever heard of Southwest.” Spoken like a true New Yorker. When I politely pointed out to him that in terms of domestic passengers carried, Southwest was
the largest airline in the United States
—and about five times the size of JetBlue—his facial expression made it clear he thought I was either lying or wrong, and he suggested we just skip it.

Of course, JetBlue is based in New York City, and Dallas-based Southwest had only entered the Big Apple market in 2009. Conversely, JetBlue has both lived and died by operating in the glare of so much media coverage. Compared to other start-up airlines, it received an unusually high percentage of exposure when it launched in 2000; one former employee acknowledges it was the “Teflon airline.” On the flip side, it withered under the intense coverage of its infamous “Valentine's Day Massacre” operational meltdown in 2007; I'm certain that a carrier based in St. Louis or Milwaukee would never have received such scrutiny. And if JetBlue's former flight attendant Steven Slater had popped that slide in Denver rather than at JFK, I sincerely doubt he would have become an instant media star.

Unfortunately, the same rules apply to safety. Some domestic airline incidents and accidents are more carefully scrutinized simply because of where they occur. Alaska Airlines underwent a virtual maintenance meltdown before and after the crash of Flight 261 in 2000, but outside the company's hometown of Seattle, this alarming story never gained traction on a national scale. Even though Alaska Airlines is ranked as a major carrier, its route map is noticeably thin in the Northeast, and therefore in my view it flies below a lot of media radar. And what's even more alarming is that a lack of press coverage can delay action on the part of the FAA, which has a reputation for responding to crises only after they're full-blown media events.

Flying Nonrevenue: Airline Wining and Dining

One Saturday in 1994 I took my son to the circus at Madison Square Garden. But we didn't squeeze into the bleachers with the hoi polloi; we sat high up in a private skybox, with kosher franks and blondies and other treats bought and paid for by KIWI International Air Lines. In its early stages, KIWI still had enough start-up funding left over to wine and dine the travel press, but that dried up fast enough.

For the aviation editor of a travel trade magazine, it was more than okay to accept such invitations. Actually, it was expected that I would spend my evenings and weekends being schmoozed by airline execs. In fact, it was a proud tradition: travel trade reporters had been receiving free lunches and tchotchkes since stagecoach operators decided to throw the first press trip.

Two years earlier I had left the airline industry to start at the bottom in journalism, and the pay cut was steep indeed. Some days I showed up at the magazine wondering if I had enough cash for lunch. A slice of pizza but walk home via the 59th Street Bridge? Inevitably I'd receive a fax that some airline or another was holding a press luncheon that day and within hours I'd be at Smith & Wollensky or Windows on the World or some other classic chophouse. With only four bucks in my wallet, I'd choose between House-Made Tagliatelle Formaggio or Porcini-Crusted Duck with Balsamic Reduction. Eventually I learned not to check a coat so I'd be spared the embarrassment of coming up short with a tip.

We trade reporters expected such treatment from airlines. So you can imagine my surprise when KIWI's private skybox door opened and in strolled the aviation editor for a major national publication, along with his wife and young daughter. His suddenly ashen face told the tale. There was no airline news being made at the circus, no exclusive interviews. This journalist was in flagrant violation of his publication's own stated policy on accepting freebies from corporations he wrote about. And clearly he had not expected a lowly trade reporter to be passing the blondies. I never squealed on him. But I learned early on that the divide was not nearly as great as I had imagined between trade journalists and those writing for the public.

And it's a good thing those tickets weren't charged to me, because there's no telling how big a tab I ran up on airline vouchers in the eight years I wrote for trades. I flew all over the world to airline press events, often in first class (business class when necessary). In Frankfurt, I stood on the tarmac as five Star Alliance wide-body commercial jets from five different airlines buzzed the field in formation. I flew on several inaugural flights, including the delivery of the first Boeing 777, thanks to United, and the first nonstop flight to Beijing, thanks to Northwest. In fact, airlines asked me to ride on every kind of commercial aircraft from helicopters to the Concorde.

Meanwhile, KLM invited me to tour the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Lufthansa invited me to experience Oktoberfest in Munich, and British Airways invited me to visit the London theater district. Northwest paid for me to hike to the top of the Great Wall in China. I took a Jeep tour of the Arizona desert sponsored by America West and Jet-Skied in Hawaii courtesy of TWA. I sailed the Hudson River on a party boat chartered by Continental and toured a Costa Rican coffee plantation thanks to Delta. Airline expense accounts allowed me to go clubbing in Lima, wine tasting in London's Soho, and snorkeling in Anguilla.

I had breakfast on El Al, lunch on Aer Lingus, and dinner on Alitalia. I consumed slaughterhouses of beef, barnyards of chicken breasts, boatloads of salmon, and barrels of red wine. And it was all charged to Singapore Airlines, Air Jamaica, Mexicana, Emirates, All Nippon Airways, SAS, Varig, Air Canada, Swissair, Thai Airways, and dozens of others. Although there was a long tradition of travel trade reporters calling travel agents “shrimp-eaters” who couldn't wait to attack an airline-paid buffet, quite a few crustaceans passed our own lips as well. Once—on a weeklong tour hosted by Airbus of the new A-340 factory in Toulouse, France—I and about a dozen other aviation journalists were fed enough foie gras to have killed Elvis.

The improprieties extended even further. One Friday evening at the Plaza Hotel in New York, I danced with an airline public relations rep at a company function and much later that night found myself making out with her at the Oak Bar. In my feeble defense, there were two mitigating factors: she worked for an outside PR agency, not the airline itself, and it was a small carrier based in a small country and rarely if ever would I be called upon to write about its operations. But then again, I knew more than one travel trade reporter who slept with airline employees they had interviewed.

Over the years I became friendly with many airline PR folks, and in a few cases I would even say I became friends. When I was struggling through a very painful custody battle, I often spoke for hours with a public relations rep at one of the major airlines, because she had endured a similar experience years before. She was a very kind person, and I don't believe for a moment she had ulterior motives for speaking to me; rather, the fact remains I was the one out of line, and turning to her for emotional support was wrong, just like the Oak Bar was wrong.

I share all this not as a mea culpa or a lame effort to cleanse my journalistic soul. I share it because in those years I think I was a pretty fair journalist and I broke quite a few important stories for the travel trade press, many of which the airlines were quite unhappy about. Yet I never once considered that I might have been biased in any way by the wining and dining I received. Sometimes my trade editors massaged, tweaked, rewrote, and killed my work, depending on whether I had offended the sensibilities of a given airline, aka advertiser. But I never considered myself complicit, or that I somehow allowed relations with airline personnel to influence what I wrote. In fact, if that had been suggested I would have been shocked, angered, and offended.

That said, a fair amount of industry cheerleading is not unusual from the airline press; even a respected publication such as
Aviation Week & Space Technology
can appear to have blinders firmly in place. In naming Continental CEO Jeffery Smisek its 2010 Person of the Year, the magazine referred to him as “appearing to distance his airline from the accident” of Colgan Air Flight 3407 in Buffalo and called this only a “hiccup.” Smisek's congressional testimony enraged family members of the fifty people killed in that crash, and it's doubtful any of those next of kin would consider his actions a hiccup.

At times, beat reporters can tend to sound not like impartial chroniclers but like industry flacks. I asked Joe Brancatelli if journalists are susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome if they cover one business too long, and he said, “I think they are.” He claimed the relationship can become incestuous, particularly when reporters are worried about access to key executives for one-on-one interviews.

However, an old friend who covered the airline beat from Washington for many years says this of the “free lunch” issue: “I think there was a backlash against that kind of coziness after deregulation. If you're a good solid reporter who is fair, I don't think you will be able to be bought—especially that cheaply. I've always trusted that my friends [in the industry] understand that I have a job to do. Look, some of my best stories have come from those relationships.” This reporter adds, “I understand there's a danger in getting too cozy. But with airlines and finance, you have to make an exception. It's too complex for new people to cover.”

Entering the Nonprofit Monastery

The way I learned to curtail my relations with the airlines was to find religion and take vows. No, not that kind. I began writing for the largest nonprofit consumer organization in the world. In early 2000 I became the editor in chief of
Consumer Reports Travel Letter
, and found Consumers Union is unlike any other publisher in America. The company anonymously buys and tests all kinds of products, with no advertising, no marketing deals, no “strategic partnerships.” Even the fund-raising department won't accept gifts from corporations. When
Consumer Reports
screws up, it's never because someone kissed up to an advertiser.

This is no small matter. The wall between editorial and sales is quite low at some media companies, and airline executives have been happy to vault it. As you read earlier, Delta's racist and homophobic interviewing practices in 1991 were highlighted by
Newsday
in the front-page article “They Love to Pry and It Shows.”
American Journalism Review
later reported that the inflammatory headline prompted Delta to pull its ads from
Newsday
, costing the newspaper $2.2 million—a graphic case of an airline attempting to influence media coverage.

Fast-forward twenty years and it appears an entirely new management team at Delta still responds to negative coverage by shooting the messenger—with a cannon. In March 2011, Atlanta radio producer Chadd Scott encountered a lengthy delay on a Delta departure out of St. Louis so he tweeted: “The bean counter who saved Delta a few bucks in st. lou hoping he wouldn't need more de-icing fluid this year screwed a lot of people today.” By the time Scott returned to Atlanta, he was fired; according to WXIA-TV, “his bosses told him Delta threatened to pull its advertising from the station.”